Allies of jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny sounded the alarm at local time on Tuesday when they discovered he was no longer in prison where he had been serving his sentence and that his whereabouts were unknown. they had brought.
But at the end of the day, the chairman of a prison monitoring commission said Navalny had been transferred to a nearby maximum security prison.
Navalny was transferred to the IK-6 prison in the village of Melekhovo in the Vladimir region, Russian news agencies reported, citing Sergei Yazhan, chairman of the regional Public Monitoring Commission. Melekhovo is about 250 km east of Moscow.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears in a video link from prison. (AP)
Prison transfers to Russia sometimes take days and are secretly surrounded. The lack of information about the whereabouts of Navalny, the most determined political enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had worried his allies.
“All this time we don’t know where Alexei is. He is left alone with the system that has already tried to kill him once,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on social media earlier. After the transfer was reported, he said his close collaborators had not been able to confirm it independently.
His closest ally, Leonid Volkov, told Telegram that Navalny’s lawyer went to visit him in prison on Tuesday and told him “there are no convicts here.”
Navalny supporters say they cannot confirm their whereabouts in the Russian prison system. (AP)
“We don’t know where Alexei is now and what prison they are taking him to,” Volkov said.
Lawyer Olga Mikhaylova told the Russian state news agency Tass that Navalny’s lawyers were told they had transferred him to a maximum security prison, “but what, they didn’t tell us.”
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 on his return from Germany, where he had recovered from a Kremlin-induced nerve poisoning, and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for violating parole.
In March, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison for fraud and contempt of court, which he rejected for political reasons and an attempt by authorities to keep him behind bars for as long as possible.
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The judge ordered the Kremlin critic to serve his new sentence in a maximum security prison. He was supposed to be transferred to one after losing his appeal.
The new conviction came after a year-long crackdown by the Kremlin against Navalny supporters, other opposition activists and independent journalists in which authorities appear eager to quell any dissent.
Navalny’s close associates have faced criminal charges and many have left the country, while his group’s political infrastructure, an anti-corruption foundation and a national network of regional offices have been destroyed. extremist organization.
Until now, Navalny had been in the IK-2 penal colony in the Vladimir region. The Pokrov city facility stands out among Russian prisons for its particularly strict inmate routines, which include being on guard for hours. The IK-6 is about 150 miles to the east.
Russia’s secrecy over the transfer of prisoners has been criticized by human rights defenders.